N NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ■ Series of mystery novels for young readers Date Launched in 1930 Author Carolyn Keene (pseudonym used by different authors) Identification Nancy Drew is the most enduring of the sleuthing heroes of young-adult series books. She has been celebrated by the feminist movement as a role model. Although accurate sales figures for the early volumes of the series are incomplete, publishers claim the books, which have appeared in twenty-five languages, have sold more copies worldwide than the mysteries of Agatha Christie. Nancy Drew was the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which packaged series books for young people, written to formula by a number of ghostwriters. Stratemeyer’s Hardy Boys books, from 1927, had been so successful that he planned a similar series for girls. “Nan Drew” was a name he initially proposed, but his publishers, Grosset & Dunlap, settled on “Nancy Drew.” Stratemeyer wrote plot outlines and devised titles for the volumes. Mildred Benson wrote the first four volumes to Stratemeyer’s specifications. They were published in 1930, under the name Carolyn Keene. Of the sixteen volumes published during the decade, Benson wrote all but three; Walter Karig became Carolyn Keene for volumes eight through ten. Benson, who received $125 per book, put much of her own personality into the vivacious, outspoken Nancy. Benson was an energetic midwestern journalist who piloted her own plane. Architectural interests took her to Mayan ruins and canoe trips in Mexico. From the first published volume, The Secret of the Old Clock (1930), to the last volume of the decade, The Clue of the Tapping Heels (1939), Nancy Drew lives a charmed life. She is sixteen years old, relieved of school attendance and parental oversight. Her single parent, Carson Drew, is a busy attorney, preoccupied with his own mysteries, which Nancy sometimes has to solve for him. The housekeeper, Hannah Gruen, provides domestic comforts when Nancy rests from her escapades at the Drew home in midwestern River Heights, an idyllic town untouched by the Depression. Nancy travels backcountry roads in her blue roadster and, when danger threatens, carries her father’s revolver. She never lacks for money, wears beautiful clothes, and snacks in picturesque tearooms. Police sometimes ask her for help, and adults generally defer to her. Though she has little interest in romance, her devoted boyfriend is Ned Nickerson, a college athlete. Always ready to lend their support in her perilous exploits are her best girlfriends: Helen Corning, Bess Marvin, and George Fayne. None of Nancy’s friends resents her beauty, privilege, and facility with horses, boats, the French language, Morse Code, and anything else that comes her way. Most of all, Nancy is skilled at sleuthing. Though she finds herself frequently caught in underground passages; bound up in deserted cottages; and threatened by vicious dogs, poisonous insects, and an array of desperate criminals, she is never at a loss. Every mystery is solved by the end of each book, along with a teaser promoting the next series volume. The illustrations of the early books, by Russell H. Tandy, a commercial fashion artist, added much to their appeal and made the original volumes collector’s items. Nancy has bobbed hair and wears cloche hats, pearls, and shoes with high heels that are sharp enough to tap out messages when she is held captive. She comes equipped with gloves, handbags, and Art Deco coats. The dust jackets invariably capture Nancy in a dramatic moment, climbing the stairs in a hidden passage or peeping in the broken window of a deserted bungalow. Impact The early Nancy Drew volumes have been attacked for their ethnic stereotypes of Jews, Eastern 660 ■ Nation of Islam Europeans, and African Americans. Later editions attempted to correct these problems, while making Nancy more conventional, if less interesting. Collectors prefer the original volumes. Nancy’s adventures in River Heights helped readers escape the deprivations of the Depression and rumors of war. The fact that teachers and librarians found the books objectionable only added to their popularity. Nancy enabled young girls to believe they too could lead lives of achievement and adventure. Among the many accomplished women who have acknowledged the early influence of Nancy Drew are politician Hillary Clinton, opera singer Beverly Sills, television journalist Barbara Walters, former First Lady Laura Bush, and the first three women appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Allene Phy-Olsen Further Reading Mason, Bobbie Ann. The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide. Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1975. Plunkett-Powell, Karen. The Nancy Drew Scrapbook. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Rehak, Melanie. Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. New York: Harcourt, 2005. See also African Americans; Anti-Semitism; Great Depression in the United States; Literature in the United States; Recreation. ■ American-based Muslim religious organization Date Founded in July, 1930 Place Detroit, Michigan Identification Established during a period of African American migration out of the South and growing economic disparities between the races, worsened by the Great Depression, the Nation of Islam represents an important strain of African American nationalism. It served the religious and political needs of many African Americans during the 1930’s by espousing freedom and justice for black people, and it would become one of the most important African American institutions in later decades as well. The exact beginnings of the Nation of Islam (adherents call themselves Muslims) are not clearly recorded. The founder, Wallace Dodd Fard (also The Thirties in America known as Wallace Fard Muhammad), spread word of his variant of Islam through door-to-door sales in Detroit among dispossessed blacks, beginning in July, 1930. Fard initially used the Bible to teach about Islam as the religion of black people in Asia and Africa, and eventually he introduced followers to the Qur$3n, the holy book of Islam. At its inception, the Nation of Islam held religious meetings in private homes. Within three years, as a result of the religion’s rapid growth, Fard was holding temple meetings in a hall and had established Muslim schools for children in Detroit. Mainstream Muslims regard the Nation of Islam as a separatist Islamic sect. Fard’s religious doctrines were heavily infused with racial ideologies (though the exact racial lineage of Fard himself remains debated and unknown). Among its tenets, the Nation of Islam teaches that black people are the original humans and Caucasians the result of the workings of a mad scientist named Yakub. Likened to “devils,” white people, the Nation of Islam argued, were inferior to black people. Shortly after its founding, the Nation of Islam attracted controversy for some of its more inflammatory racial teachings. Fard taught his followers that one could be ensured salvation through Mecca by sacrificing (murdering) four “white devils.” In 1932 and 1933, the Nation of Islam attracted much attention from the Detroit police over this tenet, and rumors of at least one sacrifice persist to this day, though the tenet is omitted from modern teachings. Fard disappeared from the organization sometime during 1933 or 1934. Speculation arose that he had been murdered. Historians have deemed this unlikely, but stories have circulated about his subsequent whereabouts for decades. Since 1931, Fard had been grooming a convert, Elijah Poole (who later was given a Muslim name, Elijah Muhammad), for ministry in the Nation of Islam. After Fard’s disappearance, Muhammad continued to preach throughout the United States, predominantly in the North and in Washington, D.C., proselytizing according to the doctrine he had learned from Fard. These messages were passed down in written form in The Supreme Wisdom (1957) and included the belief in one god (Allah), the holy Qur$3n, and the Bible. The Nation of Islam experienced internal fractures during this time and was threatened by outside attempts to weaken the organization, including efforts from the Communist Party USA and the Japanese. The Thirties in America Nation of Islam ■ 661 Who Was Wallace D. Fard? The first prophet of the Nation of Islam is shrouded in mystery: His national origins, his real name, and the circumstances of his 1934 disappearance are not fully known, but an FBI memorandum from Special Agent Edwin O. Raudsep, dated March 8, 1965 (approximately three decades after Fard’s death), rehearses the known facts about Fard at that time. [Wallace] Dodd arrived in the United States from New Zealand in 1913, settled briefly in Portland, Oregon. He married but abandoned his wife and infant son. He lingered in the Seattle Area as Fred Dodd for a few months, then moved to Los Angeles and opened a restaurant at 803 W. Third Street as Wallace D. Ford. He was arrested for bootlegging in January, 1926; served a brief jail sentence (also as Wallace D. Ford)—identified on record as white. On June 12, 1926, also as Ford, was sentenced to San Quentin for sale of narcotics at his restaurant; got 6-months to 6-years sentence—released from San Quentin May 27, 1929. Prison record lists him as Caucasian. After release, went to Chicago, then to Detroit as a silk peddler. His customers were mostly Negro and he himself posed as a Negro. He prided himself as a biblical authority and mathematician. When Elijah Muhammad (Poole) met him, he was passing himself off as a savior and claiming that he was born in Mecca and had arrived in the U.S. on July 4, 1930. In 1933 there was a scandal revolving about the sect involving a “human sacrifice” which may or may not have been trumped up. At any rate, the leader was arrested May 25, 1933, under the name Fard with 8 other listed aliases (W. D. Farrad, Wallace Farad, Walt Farrad, Prof. Ford, etc.). The official report says Dodd admitted that his teachings were “strictly a racket” and he was “getting all In 1942, Muhammad headquartered the Nation of Islam in Chicago and started the arduous task of rebuilding the membership, which had begun to dwindle during the latter half of the 1930’s. In the 1950’s, the organization gained public attention once again when Malcolm X took a position as its national spokesman, until he broke with the Nation of the money out of it he could.” He was ordered out of Detroit. [In a] newspaper article which appeared in the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Examiner on July 28, 1963, reporter Ed Montgomery . . . claimed to have contacted Dodd’s former common law wife. . . . According to this account, Dodd went to Chicago after leaving Detroit and became a traveling suit salesman for a mail order tailer [sic]. In this position he worked himself across the midwest and ultimately arrived in Los Angeles in the spring of 1934 in a new car and wearing flowing white robes. He tried to work out a reconciliation with the woman, but she would not agree to one. . . . He stayed in Los Angeles for two weeks, frequently visiting his son. Then he sold his car and boarded a ship bound for New Zealand where he said he would visit relatives. On Sunday, February 28, 1965, Ed Montgomery wrote a rehash of the above in which he said the Muslims claim “police and San Quentin Prison records dating back to the early 1920’s had been altered and that fingerprints identifying Farad as Dodd had been doctored.” Elijah Mohummad [sic] said he would have posted $100,000 reward “for any person who could prove Farad and Dodd were one and the same person.” Ten days later Muhammad’s office in Chicago was advised Farad’s common law wife and a blood relative were prepared to establish the truth of Farad’s identity. The $100,000 never was placed in escrow and the matter was dropped forthwith. Islam in 1964. Elijah Muhammad retained control of the organization until his death in 1975. Impact During a time of great economic and racial difficulty for northern blacks, many of whom had found their prospects for economic and social equality little improved after migrating north from 662 ■ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People The Thirties in America the South, the Nation of Islam proved to be an important religious and political vehicle within the African American community. Initial memberships spread quickly after an ambiguous start in urban Detroit. A uniquely American version of Islam, the Nation of Islam had special resonance for racially and economically dispossessed African Americans in the 1930’s. The message of hope and equality espoused by the Nation of Islam became an important vein of African American nationalism throughout 1950’s and 1960’s. Sadie Pendaz moved north, these tensions increased in northern cities as well. The NAACP’s principal objective was to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all citizens of the United States, regardless of race. The organization used the democratic processes of lobbying and litigation in an effort to remove what it considered to be the three major evils of discrimination against African Americans—school segregation, lynching, and Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation in the South. Further Reading sonnel, the NAACP launched its first successful protest, challenging President Herbert Hoover’s nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court. The NAACP opposed the nomination of U.S. Circuit Court judge John J. Parker of North Carolina because he supported laws that discriminated against African Americans. When President Hoover refused to withdraw Parker’s name, the NAACP launched a massive six-week campaign to prevent his confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Senators received numerous wires, letters, and telephone calls from NAACP branches across the country and received pressure from African American newspapers, important segments of the white press, and organized labor. As a result of the NAACP’s efforts, Judge Parker failed to receive Senate confirmation by a vote of 41-39. The NAACP staged a coordinated strategy of legal battles in its campaign to end racial segregation in the nation’s schools. It took states and counties to court to force them to abide by the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which ruled that segregation was permissible only if the separate facilities for African Americans were equal to those for Caucasians. This legal strategy forced states, counties, and municipalities either to abandon segregation or to incur the costs of providing truly equal facilities, a practically impossible undertaking during the Depression. For its early litigation efforts, the NAACP relied on lawyers who volunteered their services. However, by the 1930’s, it was able to hire its own legal team, which consisted of Charles Hamilton Houston, the dean of Howard University School of Law, and Thurgood Marshall, who argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1967, he became the first African American Supreme Court associate justice. The NAACP’s legal strategy worked. In 1936, Lee, Martha F. The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994. Muhammad, Elija. The Supreme Wisdom. 2 vols. Atlanta, Ga.: Messenger Elijah Muhammad Propagation Society, 1957. Walker, Dennis. Islam and the Search for AfricanAmerican Nationhood: Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and the Nation of Islam. Atlanta, Ga.: Clarity Press, 2005. African Americans; Great Depression in the United States; Jim Crow segregation; Migrations, domestic; Religion in the United States. See also ■ Identification Civil rights advocacy organization Date Founded on February 12, 1909 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began as a grassroots organization in response to increased violence against African Americans. Throughout its existence, the NAACP has worked primarily through the U.S. legal system in its campaign to help African Americans gain equal civil rights. The 1930’s were a turbulent time for race relations in the United States. The increased presence of African Americans in southern cities resulted in heightened tension between the African Americans and Caucasians. As more and more African Americans Fighting Discrimination Through the Courts and Congress In 1930, with meager resources and per- The Thirties in America National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ■ 663 the NAACP won a lawsuit that resulted in the desegregation of the University of Maryland School of Law, and in 01938, another NAACP lawsuit caused the Supreme Court to order the admission of an African American student to the University of Missouri School of Law. Fighting to End Lynching and to Protect Voting Rights While lynchings peaked during the 1890’s, an upsurge in lynchings of African Americans occurred during the 1930’s, perhaps because of frustrations unleashed by the Depression. The NAACP had concentrated its attention on the lynching epidemic sweeping the nation in the The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fought to end the first two decades of the twentieth cenracial segregation—represented by this “white-only” restaurant sign in Lancaster, Ohio—prevalent in most parts of the United States. (Library of Congress) tury but renewed its efforts for a federal antilynching law after a series of highly publicized lynchings in Alalence that included cross burnings, church burnbama, Maryland, Indiana, and California. The Comings, arson of African American businesses and munist Party USA launched its own antilynching homes, and even murder and lynchings. The campaign. However, opposition from southern NAACP lobbied for laws that would not only outlaw Democrats blocked the passage of such a law. The these discriminatory tactics but also ban the use of U.S. House of Representatives had passed the bill poll taxes and literacy tests to deny African Ameridespite the opposition of all but one southern memcans their voting rights. The NAACP suffered a setber. The U.S. Senate, however, carried out a sixback in its bid for equal voting rights when in 1937 a week-long filibuster that resulted in the withdrawal unanimous U.S. Supreme Court upheld as constituof the bill in February, 1938. Although unsuccessful tional state poll-tax laws. Because many African Amerin its efforts to encourage a federal law to be passed, icans could not afford to pay poll taxes, they were the NAACP brought public attention to the brutality effectively denied the right to vote. The NAACP conof lynching and helped to significantly reduce its tinued its voting rights campaign throughout the occurrence, and states began to pass their own 1930’s, but another thirty years passed before southantilynching laws. ern states were forced to abandon these discriminaThe NAACP also was devoted to ending racial distory tactics. crimination at the voting booth. Even though African American males were guaranteed the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment, which had been Fighting Discrimination During the Depression The ratified in 1870 shortly after the end of the Civil War, Great Depression of the 1930’s created havoc inside states and local municipalities continued to use variand outside the NAACP. While all Americans sufous elaborate tactics to prevent African Americans fered during the Depression, the economic situafrom voting. All-white state, county, and local police tion was particularly disastrous for African Ameriforces routinely intimidated, harassed, and even arcans. The Harlem Renaissance and the exuberance rested African American voters. Throughout the of the Roaring Twenties were over. In addition to its South, African Americans faced losing their homes other civil rights activities, the NAACP had to focus or their jobs if they tried to exercise their constituon ways to win jobs for African Americans and end tional right to vote. If intimidation and economic discriminatory hiring practices. With white middlepressure did not work, white mobs turned to vioclass income drastically reduced, almost one-half 664 ■ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People million African American women who worked cleaning white families’ homes found themselves without jobs. In the South, hungry Caucasians began to take jobs that had been traditionally held by African Americans. Bellhops and other African American workers were fired so that Caucasians could have their jobs. At the peak of the Depression, a majority of African American workers were on government relief. The Works Progress Administration (renamed the Works Projects Administration in 1939) and other government agencies created by the New Deal to help U.S. citizens affected by the Depression often discriminated against African Americans. Private charities—even some religious organizations—also found ways of favoring needy Caucasians over needy African Americans and some soup kitchens and breadlines turned away African American families. Despite a sharp decline in its membership as a result of the Depression, the NAACP still managed to continue its civil-rights mission. It successfully opposed southern plans to close down relief projects in order to force African Americans into picking cotton for considerably low wages. NAACP executive secretary Walter White, who was a friend and adviser to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, met with her often in attempts to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to outlaw job discrimination in the armed forces, defense industries, and the agencies spawned by Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. Roosevelt did not publicly support civil rights for African Americans, and his administration was silent on the issue until the late 1930’s, when Eleanor Roosevelt began to speak up on behalf of African Americans. The NAACP’s other activities ranged from supporting a student strike at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, to challenging the exclusion of African Americans from juries. The NAACP represented African Americans accused of crimes, which included its help with the defense of nine African American boys, aged fourteen to twenty, later known as the “Scottsboro Boys,” who were charged with raping two white women on a freight train in Scottsboro, Alabama. The NAACP also fought against Jim Crow-segregated cars on railroads and street railways and segregated neighborhoods and for the right for African Americans to belong to trade unions. The NAACP also opposed vigorously the unequal salaries paid to African American public school teachers. The association was successful in The Thirties in America preventing the exclusion of African American Boy Scouts from the 1937 Scout Jamboree held in Washington, D.C. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused permission for famous opera singer Marian Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., because it did not allow African Americans to perform there. The NAACP, with the aid of the Roosevelts, was able to arrange an open-air concert for her on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. On Easter Sunday in 1939, Anderson performed to a crowd of more than seventy-five thousand people of all colors and to a radio audience of millions. Throughout the 1930’s the NAACP mounted scores of investigations and court actions that challenged efforts to deny African Americans the civil rights that were guaranteed to all U.S. citizens under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The NAACP during the 1930’s was relentless in keeping the issues of race discrimination in the public eye. By the end of the decade, the NAACP had begun to realize the fruit of its labor with important legal victories and its increasing influence nationally and internationally. Impact The NAACP’s forceful and persistent litigation and civil rights activism during the 1930’s ultimately resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court overthrowing its “separate but equal” doctrine for public schools with its 1954 landmark ruling in Brown v. the Board of the Education. The NAACP’s lobbying efforts and legal challenges continued throughout the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s and resulted in the eventual passage of a number of laws designed to stop racial inequality in the areas of civil rights, voting rights, and housing. Eddith A. Dashiell Further Reading Jones, Gilbert. Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism, 1909-1969. New York: Routledge, 2005. Rhym, Darren. The NAACP. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. Santella, Andrew. The NAACP: An Organization Working to End Discrimination. Chanhassen, Minn.: Child’s World, 2004. Sullivan, Patricia. Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: New Press, 2009. Tushnet, Mark V. The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against The Thirties in America Segregating Education, 1925-1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Anderson, Marian; Bethune, Mary McLeod; Breedlove v. Suttles; Civil rights and liberties in the United States; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Jim Crow segregation; Lynching; Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada; Race riots; Racial discrimination; Scottsboro trials; Supreme Court, U.S.; Voting rights. See also ■ Business interest group formed to promote the growth of American industry Date Established in 1895 Identification The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) has been one of the most powerful and important business interest groups in the United States. During the economic turmoil of the 1930’s the organization undertook a massive public-relations campaign highlighting the strengths of American business. Since its late nineteenth century founding in Cincinnati, Ohio, the NAM has consistently been one of the most powerful broad-based business interest groups in the United States. The NAM was originally conceived as an umbrella interest organization for manufacturers during the recessionary 1890’s. Following the prosperous 1920’s, the NAM was forced to return to its roots as an advocate for a befallen industrial base. During the 1930’s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal expanded the federal government to cope with the shrinking U.S. economy and, in the following decade, the heavy demands of World War II. This increased government activity took the form of bureaucratic hiring and spending and expanded regulation and oversight of business not seen since the Progressive Era. American manufacturing concerns, which had enjoyed a position of societal leadership in the preceding decades and would during the postwar boom of the 1950’s, were threatened and entrenched during the 1930’s. This collective anxiety prompted the NAM to spend the decade in a defensive posture. The group’s strategy was to launch a massive, multi- National Association of Manufacturers ■ 665 million-dollar public-relations campaign not selling particular products, such as laundry soap or small appliances, but selling the broadly conceived idea of American business. The group transformed into a public-relations firm for what it called at the time “the American way of life,” a euphemism for positioning business at the vanguard of U.S. society. The NAM aimed for private-sector businesses and not the Roosevelt administration to hold the controlling interest in the United States. Actions by the NAM during the 1930’s solidified the bond between conservative political ideology and the corporate lobby. For example, the NAM sponsored conservative radio commentators in most major media markets. It even launched its own radio program, called The American Family Robinson, that highlighted the regulatory misdeeds of what the NAM considered to be the overactive Roosevelt administration. Specifically, the NAM took issue with pro-labor collectivebargaining policies, a shortened workday, and increases in the minimum rate of pay. Impact In NAM-produced short films and newspaper ads, interventionist government policies were painted as enemies of the common working man. At first blush, the NAM could have been seen as an elite organization composed of capital-driven organizations, but the group did not present itself that way while making its policy points. It was a strong advocate for business leaders but also relayed the message of solidarity with everyday working Americans. R. Matthew Beverlin Further Reading Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth. “Creating a Favorable Business Climate: Corporations and Radio Broadcasting, 1934 to 1954.” Business History Review 73 (Summer, 1999): 221-255. Soffer, Jonathan. “The National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism.” Business History Review 75 (Winter, 2001): 775-805. Tedlow, Richard S. “The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations During the New Deal.” Business History Review 50, no. 1 (1976): 25-45. Advertising in the United States; Business and the economy in the United States; Great Depression in the United States; New Deal; Recession of 1937-1938; Unemployment in the United States. See also
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